It's still November and as such, I whipped up this short and sort of lame post on Saturday morning. This week, I bring some reflections about my own continued inability to make meaningful progress on writing projects at home.
I have a complicated relationship with the idea that productivity can be ritualized, and that you can simply go a specific place to be productive, or that you must be using a certain type of device to be productive.
I see it talked about most commonly in the context of vintage computers, where enthusiasts will happily spend as much time as needed talking about the merits of using an older computer for whatever particular productivity purpose. Either they'll claim that the old computer is actually better at a particular task, or that any discussion about its performance is filled with misinformation or FUD.
It's really interesting what people will do to justify it to themselves. Ultimately what it comes down to is that people have a preferred tool, but they can't just say that they prefer a thing, they feel the burden of proof that that particular tool is actually somehow objectively best at doing a task.
And so, it's interesting when I can turn that lens back on myself. I continue to have a pretty long-standing problem where I'm most productive on my writing projects when I leave my home. I can write at home, and I can even be productive (in the sense of accomplishing "work") but when it comes to doing one of my specific writing projects, NaNoWriMo in particular, I just have problems finding any reasonable productivity.
I don't know if it's just that the computers I use at home have too much stuff on them, or if my chair isn't comfortable enough, or if there really is some weird psychology about feeling beholden to the people around you that makes people more productive in public.
What's perhaps even odder is that when I'm hosting write-ins, my productivity plummets. With the exception of word wars, I spend most of my time at write-ins socializing with people in the region and talking about writing in general. Several people seem to have gained the ability to tune out the conversation and are productive, and so it's really interesting to see who appears to be productive and who is mostly there in an effort specifically not to be productive.
For me, it has long been harmful that I have problems being productive in my own home. I can sit down and physically write words, but almost never do I write a lot, and usually, the actual inspiration comes later on. For example, I recently sat down in the afternoon at my computer trying to write a little bit. I ended up writing a hundred words or so, over the course of nearly a half hour, before deciding to do some chores and then hit up the Weird IHOP, where I proceeded to have some soup and a burger, and smashed out over 6,300 words over the course of an hour or so.
The limitation is almost certainly more psychological than physical. Weird IHOP has Wi-Fi, which works perfectly well and allows me to hop on my VPN and do the full range of normal things to TECT, or even hopping onto forums and other chat channels. Despite that, I think there's still some sort of mental limitation. The Wi-Fi at Weird IHOP is a thing to be preserved, because it's not my own.
Perhaps when writing in public, there's a sort of obligation to other people. I'm here using a specific resource, and if I don't use that resource effectively, to generate a lot of progress on a project, then I've used it poorly and feel guilty about it. Using guilt to drive progress on a project is weird though, and probably a bad idea.
My life today is an extension of my college life. I didn't really do much in the way of transitioning after my graduation, and so it's possible that despite not needing to be, I'm still in the student frame of mine, where things like NaNoWriMo books or big blog entries are assignments that I need to finish, and the frame of operation as a student was always to go to a coffee shop, the lab, the union, or the library to work. It's perhaps not by accident that my most productive spaces are restaurants, coffee shops, and places on the university campus.
I don't know if this is something I need to retrain myself, something I need to fix in my workspace at home, or something that can't be fixed, such as a dependence on the atmosphere of a public place for people-watching reasons, or even the particular background noises or predictable, minimal interruptions that provide good progress check-points, such as a service representative asking if you need anything else. In the NaNo off-season (perhaps during an upcoming Camp session) I'll need to test out some potential theories.